The Deed to the House in Which Norman Rockwell Painted His Famous “Four Freedoms” During World War II, Signed by Rockwell and His Wife Mary

Norman Rockwell, though a New Yorker, is associated today with Stockbridge, Mass., the town in the Berkshires where he settled in his later years. Stockbridge was the last place he lived, and it is the home of the Norman Rockwell Museum. However, initially his move to New England was not to Stockbridge, but to Arlington, Vermont, where he and his wife bought a house in 1938. Rockwell was then in his mid-40s, a celebrated illustrator who was looking to deepen his art. He had painted his share of amusing covers, of freckled schoolboys and their dogs, and he hoped to tap into some truer, more expressive vein of American life. What drew him to New England was not so much the picket-fence tranquillity as the larger idea of it as the birthplace of American democracy, and its reassuring we-the-people symbolism. 

 

Compared to his former home in the suburbs of New York City, rural Arlington was "like living in another world," and it completely transformed his already successful career as America's leading illustrator. For the first time he began to paint pictures that "grew out of the everyday life of my neighbors," storytelling pictures that touched millions of people around the world. 

 

In his Arlington house, in early 1943 during World War II, Rockwell painted his much-beloved “Four Freedoms” – freedom to speak and to worship, freedom from fear and from want. The four paintings had nothing to do with patriots on horseback and the fiery battle for independence. Rather, they portrayed the civic and familial rituals that connect random people in a town and nation. Using his Vermont neighbors as models, Rockwell posed them in emblematic scenes: attending a town-hall meeting, saying prayers, socializing around a Thanksgiving table, and peeking in on sleeping children.

 

In 1943 a disastrous fire destroyed Rockwell's studio and many of his works, as well as valuable props such as Revolutionary era clothing. Rockwell blamed the extent of the loss on his location’s distance from a fire station; and resolved never to let that happen again, he decided to move. In 1943 he sold his house and property, moving to a picturesque house that had once been a tavern and tourist home. 

 

Document signed by both Rockwell and his wife Mary, Arlington, Vermont, October 14, 1943, being the actual deed by which the Rockwell’s conveyed their home and property to Frederick and Grace Bonsal. Accompanying this are two original photographs of the house.

 

Ten years later, Rockwell and his family moved to Stockbridge MA, where he lived and worked until his death in 1978.